In the course of her self-education, the future empress Catherine II of Russia came upon the writings of Tacitus, with their rich descriptions of the personalities and intrigues of the early Roman Empire. She later recalled that they inspired her "to look for deeper and more basic causes that really underlay and shaped the different events around me."

One wonders what she would make of her new biography by Robert K. Massie, the Pulitzer-Prize winning portraitist of other Romanovs like Nicholas and Alexandra and Peter the Great.

Catherine was born Sophia Friederike Auguste, a minor German princess. At 14, the Empress Elizabeth of Russia selected her to be the mate for her awkward nephew, the future Peter II. Sophia dutifully studied Russian language and history. She converted from Lutheranism to Orthodoxy and took the Russian name Ekaterina.

Her new husband proved more interested in his toy soldiers, and their nine-year marriage was never consummated. Eager for an heir, Elizabeth quietly arranged for Catherine to take the first of her dozen lovers.

In 1762, Peter inherited his throne, but his open admiration for all things Prussian quickly made him unpopular. After only six months, regiments under the command of Catherine's lover deposed him and proclaimed her empress.

During her 34-year reign, Catherine imported Western tastes, ideas and medical practices. She corresponded with Francois Voltaire and Baron von Grimm, patronized Diderot, and created the great collection of Old Masters at the Hermitage. She also pushed the frontiers of her empire west into Poland, and south to the Black Sea.

Catherine's enemies made much of her dalliances; she herself confessed, "I couldn't live for a day without love." But she only lavished power upon men of exceptional ability like Grigory Potemkin. She limited carefully the political roles of other paramours, and always parted with them on generous terms.

As in his earlier works, Massie crafts an intimate portrayal of Russian royalty, ushering us into their nurseries, carriages and bedrooms. "Catherine the Great" is also exhaustively detailed. The reader must shovel through piles of jewel-encrusted portraits, Sevres porcelain and brocade cloth to find a thesis, or (often) a narrative thread.

Catherine may have sought the underlying causes of history, but Massie's often hinges upon chance. Accidents of noble births and fatal diseases, good looks and kind gestures opened unexpected paths to incredible power.

And trivial incidents -- an overturned writing case, a careless remark or an unguarded expression -- could inspire deadly antagonisms, ruinous at court.

Throughout the book, Massie limits himself almost exclusively to Catherine's point of view. As a result, she often seems to be the only person capable of rising above explosive tempers and massive egos to adopt magnanimous or principled positions.

Massie absolves Catherine of responsibility in the death of her wretched and dethroned husband. He dismisses detractions of Potemkin's villages in the Ukraine, now a byword for graft and duplicity, as undocumentable.

Massie also pardons the empress for failing to enshrine her Enlightenment ideals in a new law code, highlighting the self-interested squabbles of the Legislative Commission. And he condones her perpetuation of serfdom: the "traditions, prejudices, and ignorance" of both owners and peasants, he judges, precluded emancipation in her lifetime.

The resulting impressions can be disturbingly uneven. Massie ascribes the cataclysmic peasant uprising of 1777 to rabble-rousing, rather than the burdens of serfdom, conscription and taxation intensified by Catherine's policies.

He credits Catherine with a prudent "sensitivity to the nuances of the possible," but has no comment on her desire to capture Constantinople and re-create a Greek empire. He recounts in grisly minutiae the atrocities of domestic and foreign rebels, but passes quickly over corresponding barbarisms carried out in the name of aristocracy and autocracy.

One can almost feel the empress peering over his shoulder.

Catherine composed the following epitaph for herself: "she wished to do what was good for her country and tried to bring happiness, liberty, and prosperity to her subjects." One wonders how her subjects, whose labor, taxes and casualties "underlay and shaped" her achievements, would have replied.

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